Sydney visit - Part II

On Friday morning the interstaters in the ACSA Exec all meet at Central Station and made our way out to Catholic Youth Services (CYS) House in Clovelly, near the beach. The house must be an old convent and it has a beautiful small chapel – it still has an east facing altar and reredos. A funny contrast was that the NET team was also staying that the house too – NET are post-school age but their mission is evangelisation in the schools. Their liturgical preference for worship is also slightly different from ACSA and guitars had to be removed from the chapel.

Well, our meeting then got under way and was rather productive. We were joined in the late afternoon by the former President Daniel Hill who is either on drugs or suffering from post-Presidential disorder. He only just now realised that he never remembered to post a package out to me 3 months ago!! Even though I have continually reminded him. He also returned my Fortescue which he had loaned for the last 18months despite buying one of his own!!

Our Exec has 4 new faces this year so we spent much of the evening bonding! We stayed up talking till 3am even though alcohol was banned from the house. Daniel and snuck in a bit and had a couple of glasses to wet the whistle. Conversation centred on liturgy and girls (even though there were two present). Overall it was very very funny. Daniel showed us his newly purchased tunicle which also came with a stole and a couple of maniples. He buys them off ebay and has quite a collection. (The girlfriend doesn’t know). Here is a picture of our Functions Manager trying them for size without an alb or cincture
Saturday began with Mass and a short session on ACSA’s finances before travelling into the city to dine with the Cardinal. Archbishop Pell is one of our patrons and always accepts our invitation for lunch. The conversation is little to do with business and is usually just social. (You should have heard him last year on Paul Collins!) He and Fr. Jordan call each other Greg and George as they are old friends. Cardinal Pell tried some time ago to steal Fr. Jordan from Brisbane. Fr. Jordan declined as he is one of the only bastions of orthodoxy in the state! It being Grand Final day and Cardinal Pell being an ex-footballer himself, our treasurer, Camillus O’Kane, was determined to talk sport. He also had the nerve to abruptly ask His Eminence whether he could watch the game with him at in his rooms! They did, but I made them return to Clovelly at half-time. No doubt Camillus’ fellow collegians will never hear the end of it!


Saturday night we ate fish & chips on the beach and us lads had a long kick & catch of the footy. Again we stayed up late but this time to NET team had secured the common room so we had to resort to my room. We had to hide our Secretary as no girls were allowed in buys rooms! How old do they think we are? Well we decided that enough was enough and that we deserved a few glasses or red that night and despite it being from the Margaret River as opposed to the Coonawarra it was quite nice. Conversation was again girls among other things… seems most of us struggle to find time to be bothered with the effort. Maybe once uni finishes was the general consensus. We did also try and spend a whole hour without talking about Catholicism or something related. We were going fine, but eventually ran out! Catholicism is an entire way of life… as I was explaining to the new kids on the block… get used to it.